New Flight Regulations Could Mean Disaster in Northern Canada

New flight rules for Canadian aircraft crew may do more harm than good in the northern regions.

Northern Canadian airline operators are speaking out over potential new rules and regulations proposed by Transport Canada, saying they would be detrimental to operations in the country’s north. The regulations suggest limiting shifts with caps for work hours and restrictions on the number of takeoffs and landings. Regulations would also be added around rest times before a pilot can fly again.

But airline operators in northern Canada say these new rules will force some operators and businesses to shut down, and may even endanger lives.

“If these rules go through by Transport Canada, regarding flight and duty times, there’s going to be a significant increase in the cost to deliver all forms of northern and remote society services, Glenn Priestley, executive director of the Northern Air Transport Association, told CBC News. “Or there will be a reduction in services — one or the other. [It will] impose economic hardship on Canadians and communities.”

Priestley notes that while new safety regulations are a good thing, the same situations don’t apply to northern operators as to the big airlines in southern Canada.

“They tried to apply the rules all the way down to the operator of a Beaver [single-engine bush plane] on floats, such as Ahmic Aviation in Yellowknife. It’s just not the same,” he told CBC News. “We’re really quite angry about it. We keep having these southern problems and southern solutions applied to northern operators who don’t have the problem in the first place.”

He cited situations were a medevac crew may have to wait for hours for a patient to stabilize but then would end up stranded because of restrictions on duty times, and fuel transfer flights to barges that are short flights but done multiple times a day – those jobs would end up taking three days rather than one because of takeoff restrictions.

“You can’t put it in the national regulations of Canada that this fits for everybody,” he told CBC News.

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